rtunity,
only to open another, and a wider, to unpresuming merit. If none but
meritorious service or real talent were to be rewarded, this nation has
not wanted, and this nation will not want, the means of rewarding all
the service it ever will receive, and encouraging all the merit it ever
will produce. No state, since the foundation of society, has been
impoverished by that species of profusion. Had the economy of selection
and proportion been at all times observed, we should not now have had an
overgrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry of humble men, and to
limit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the bounty,
or, if he pleases, the charity of the crown.

His Grace may think as meanly as he will of my deserts in the far
greater part of my conduct in life. It is free for him to do so. There
will always be some difference of opinion in the value of political
services. But there is one merit of mine which he, of all men living,
ought to be the last to call in question. I have supported with very
great zeal, and I am told with some degree of success, those opinions,
or, if his Grace likes another expression better, those old prejudices,
which buoy up the ponderous mass of his nobility, wealth, and titles. I
have omitted no exertion to prevent him and them from sinking to that
level to which the meretricious French faction his Grace at least
coquets with omit no exertion to reduce both. I have done all I could to
discountenance their inquiries into the fortunes of those who hold large
portions of wealth without any apparent merit of their own. I have
strained every nerve to keep the Duke of Bedford in that situation
which alone makes him my superior. Your Lordship has been a witness of
the use he makes of that preeminence.

But be it that this is virtue; be it that there is virtue in this
well-selected rigor: yet all virtues are not equally becoming to all men
and at all times. There are crimes, undoubtedly there are crimes, which
in all seasons of our existence ought to put a generous antipathy in
action,--crimes that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a warm
and animated pursuit. But all things that concern what I may call the
preventive police of morality, all things merely rigid, harsh, and
censorial, the antiquated moralists at whose feet I was brought up would
not have thought these the fittest matter to form the favorite virtues
of young men of rank. What might have been well e